Digital

We rigorously adhere to our User-Centred Design process from brief to launch to make sure the role of the project is agreed, the journeys are thoroughly investigated and the right technology is employed to create the best experience.

We continue to evolve our own design and development process in order that we can guide you seamlessly through every complex stage of digital product creation from user testing through to design, CMS build, REST API creation, training, deployment and on-going measurement.

We were among the first agencies to adopt Responsive Web Design, and continue to ensure our designs are seamlessly compatible with the full array of consumer media devices.

As mobile viewing outstrips that of desktop, we are once again embracing the latest developments in technology, including Progressive Web Apps, to ensure your mobile experiences are the best they can be.

Open Source is very much at the heart of Wild Dog’s technology ethos. We work with most major CMSs, such as WordPress or Joomla. For most sites these are the two CMSs we would recommend. Each has its merits, and depends on the nature of the business for the new website which one we would select. In some cases a proprietary or custom solution is more appropriate. When this is the case, Wild Dog uses open source technologies that allow for portability and independence for the client.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

At the heart of many of our websites sits a highly sophisticated management system which allows the website owner to administrate the content of their site. We choose the most appropriate CMS for the project in hand. Our choices include WordPress with custom fields, Joomla and Craft CMS.

Coding Languages

Building bespoke websites requires a fluency in a number of coding languages. WordPress and Joomla rely heavily on PHP for their core functionality. All our coding staff have a fundamental grounding in PHP. If an alternative CMS or another system is required our preferred frameworks include Laravel, Jekyll and Express.

Front-end code is what your browser renders and is also what your customers see and interact with. Front-end markup is weighed into calculations by search engines so this needs to be right! HTML5 and CSS3 (with BEM and Sass) are the bones of the front-end visuals – and coupled with modular Javascript (React/Redux, Vue.js and ES6) adds frontend functionality and usability. We’re familiar with a variety of templating languages (Twig, Nunjucks, Liquid, Blade and Mustache) which bring everything together in a coherent controlled workflow.

Workflow Tooling

A large part of building a website is utilising technologies to help with organising the workflow by compartmentalising each automated task to aid the project as a whole. These technologies include Gulp, Webpack, Yarn, Docker, code linting and Vagrant which provide each project with a similar level of automation and ease of use for all our developers. We use Git to facilitate versioning and code branches to allow several developers to work a single project simultaneously while maintaining the all important ‘Single Source of Truth’.

Application Interfaces (APIs)

Much of today’s technological world runs on systems which don’t necessarily work together out of the box. One of Wild Dog’s many skills is to interface between systems using these APIs. In addition to using APIs to parse data from application to application we have good experience in creating new interfaces to marry differing data technologies.